Quantitative criminology focuses on straightforward causal questions that are ideally addressed with randomized experiments. In practice, however, traditional randomized trials are difficult to implement in the untidy world of criminal justice. Even when randomized trials are implemented, not...

The view that empirical strategies in economics should be transparent and credible now goes almost without saying. The local average treatment effects (LATE) framework for causal inference helped make this so. The LATE theorem tells us for whom particular instrumental variables (IV) and...

Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This paper asks how advising affects graduate students' post-PhD research productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight highly-selective schools in our study, a minority of advisors do...

The ISCHEMIA Trial randomly assigned patients with ischemic heart disease to an invasive treatment strategy centered on revascularization with a control group assigned non-invasive medical therapy. As is common in such "strategy trials," many participants assigned to treatment remained untreated...

Colombia's PACES program provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers that covered half the cost of private secondary school. The vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress. Since many vouchers were assigned by lottery, program effects can reliably be...

Quantile regression(QR) fits a linear model for conditional quantiles, just as ordinary least squares (OLS) fits a linear model for conditional means. An attractive feature of OLS is that it gives the minimum mean square error linear approximation to the conditional expectation function even...

Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides exceptionally generous support to a college population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from...

Conventional value-added models (VAMs) compare average test scores across schools after regression-adjusting for students' demographic characteristics and previous scores. This paper tests for VAM bias using a procedure that asks whether VAM estimates accurately predict the achievement...

Does financial aid increase college attendance and completion? Selection bias and the high implicit tax rates imposed by overlapping aid programs make this question difficult to answer. This paper reports initial findings from a randomized evaluation of a large privately-funded scholarship...

In the canonical regression discontinuity (RD) design for applicants who face an award or admissions cutoff, causal effects are nonparametrically identified for those near the cutoff. The impact of treatment on inframarginal applicants is also of interest, but identification of such effects...